INSTINCT, INTELLIGENCE AND CHARACTER

reasoning itself, are all probably possible in man just because
he has indefinite instinctive tendencies rather than specific
and narrow instincts, and can learn./ To a preliminary
talk on habit and the laws of learning we may next turn
our attention. **

HABIT AOT> LEASHING.

A habit is distinguished from an instinct by being acquired,
not inborn. >^In an instinct, there are ready-made nerve
connections which ensure that such and such a response
will occur in a certain situation. In a habit, the nerve con-
nections have to be made by exercise and satisfaction.^
The water-chick which dives for the first time in its life when
frightened by a barking puppy, and which has never seen
another water-hen, having been brought up in an incubator,
nevertheless gives the characteristic water-hen dive.1 This
is instinctive, and the nerve connections which run from
eye and ear to spinal cord and brain, and thence to the
diving muscles, must be set ready to produce this particular
act by the hand of Nature through the mechanism of
heredity. But a boy does not dive instinctively. He has
to learn to dive, and the nerve connections which ultimately
co-ordinate his muscles when as a practised diver he plunges
into the water have been brought to this state of readiness
by long practice, by dissatisfaction at failures, and satis-
faction at successes. Diving in the case of the boy is
habitual, not instinctive. It is an acquired skill.

The word habit in ordinary conversation is most frequently
applied to moral or immoral actions, as early rising or
drunkenness. But even in ordinary speech it is extended
to cases of skill, as when we say that Jones dives badly, or
writes badly, because he got into bad habits of diving or of
writing when he was first learning. We shall not in the
present section speak much, or at all, about good or bad

1 Lloyd Morgan, " The Natural History of Experience," Brit. Jowrn,
*ycholow, 1909, iii, 11.

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